Intradepartmental Collaboration to Improve the Quality of Engineering Drawings Created by Students in Senior Design Project

This paper discusses the collaboration of faculty members in the mechanical engineering technology department to improve the quality of students’ design work in a senior design project of the Machine Design class. A faculty member who taught Machine Design, a capstone course, collaborated with two faculty members who taught Advanced Solid Modeling, a feeder course for Machine Design. The collaboration originated from a review of students design work in the senior design project of the machine design class which indicated that many students who took three engineering graphics courses still lacked certain skills and understanding when creating their design models and working drawings. For examples, many students didn’t understand the difference between working drawings and the corresponding 3D objects, and they had difficulty in creating sheet metal components and gears. This was an ongoing project which started in fall 2012. Some details concerning the implementation of intradepartmental collaborative work including assessment was discussed in this paper, more will be discussed in future papers.